Posted in: Peacock, TV | Tagged: Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy

Devil in Disguise: Macmanus on Gacy Victims Focus; Luna on Tovar

Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy creator Patrick Macmanus and star Gabriel Luna spoke with us about the Peacock true crime drama series.

Perhaps it's America's obsession with celebrity and the macabre, but there's always been a historical appeal in true crime, especially when it comes to serial killer culture, and how often it's been romanticized. Having covered the dramatization of tragedies in the Peacock anthology series Dr Death and Hulu's The Girl from Plainville, Patrick Macmanus returned to the NBC Universal streamer to cover the story of the infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy in Peacock's Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, but accepting it came with very specific conditions, dedicating far more emphasis on his victims than the killer himself. Joining him on the cathartic journey is Gabriel Luna (The Last of Us), who plays Det. Rafael Tovar, one of the original Gacy investigators Macmanus focuses on, in the true crime drama series. Both spoke to Bleeding Cool about how Macmanus wanted to approach the project, what Luna learned from plying Tovar, and the creative liberties taken for the miniseries.

Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy Creator Patrick Macmanus on Telling the Story Outside of Gacy. Gabriel Luna on How Rafael Tovar was a "Rock Star"

Patrick, what intrigued you about Devil in Disguise and wanting to tell the story of John Wayne Gacy, and how do you balance it out with telling the narratives of the victims?

Macmanus: Thank you for taking the time. I'm a big fan of Bleeding Cool, so it's good to see you. Look, at the beginning, I turned the show down twice, because I didn't want to tell the story of John Wayne Gacy, it was on the third time the studio and network asked me to come aboard that I said, "Okay, but we have to do it a different way." I told them I wanted to be about the families, police, lawyers, and ultimately, the victims, but I had no idea what any of that meant at the time I said it.
It wasn't until we got into the writer's room that we figured out the stories of the victims about telling their lives, hopes, dreams, tragedies, and backgrounds without any connection to John Wayne Gacy, or any connection to their murder, when everything came into focus, most specifically and oddly, the Gacy story, which we realized by hyper-focusing the show away from Gacy.

It gave us freedom where we needed to objectively tell the Gacy story, without any fear of salaciousness, gratuitousness, or glorification of him, because the truth of the matter is it would have been very easy to tell this story in a gratuitous manner, but the one hard red line that all of us together held was that we were never going to glorify him and part of that was we were not showing the murders. What we have crafted because of it is a story that can truthfully tell Gacy's story without anybody looking into it too deeply as something that is excusing his behavior while really keeping the focus where it's supposed to be, which is on the wake of destruction that he left behind.

Gabriel, what appealed to you about playing Rafael Tovar, and what surprised you most while you're doing prep to play him?

Luna: The fact that he was a real man, although we certainly crafted a character that is an amalgam of several different individuals, in this case. I relate to him in a lot of ways, where he comes from, his Texas roots, his pursuit, and ambition of becoming a homicide detective. He was promoted several times to that position. The fact that he was a bit of an outcast himself has been on the margins of where he worked, and that helps him to relate to these victims and to seek justice and acknowledgement of who they were.

I was appreciative of the way that the scripts were handled in the way this retelling was crafted, the repositioning of the lens, and the focus. He also, more kind of a general sense of looking cool [both laugh], like every image I ever saw of him, he looked like a rock star amid a bunch of suits. In many ways, he came from an outsider's perspective and, through that, was able to better empathize and better align himself with the families and the victim's side of the matter.

Patrick, with obviously a project of this nature, some of the difficulties are that there are so many different moving pieces as far as a real-life story as it plays out. Did you find you had to do much as far as the consolidation portion of giving roles that others have done to certain characters to retain the spirit of the story?

Macmanus: Any time you're doing something like this, it's why we always say "it's inspired by it" and not something that is a true story, right? It is something that you're going to have to put something, Gabe just talked about putting multiple characters into one. It normally comes from a place of needing to clearly define characters and ensure that everyone is on their own "individual mission," that's for lack of a more productive term. There are liberties that you're always going to take; however, everything we did was rooted either in the research or spiritually adjacent to the research that we did, which was provided by NBC News.

They provided an amazing foundation to work from. We have a private researcher that I've worked with on a few shows who does another outside dive, and so between the NBC research, books, depositions, the testimony in trials, quotes out of newspaper articles, and magazines at the time, we tried our best to build as, at least spiritually true of a journey as we could. You're always going to have to cut some…put some things together in order to tell a complete tale. There's no question about it.

Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, which also stars Michael Chernus, James Badge Dale, Michael Angarano, Chris Sullivan, Marin Ireland, Greg Bryk, and Thom Nyhuus, is available on Peacock.

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